The crowd has lessened; the rooms are thinning now. A great actor stands up to give a recitation. He selects one of Browning's poems. Lady Etwynde, having heard it often before, withdraws into one of the smaller rooms, a dainty little place, with the exquisite colouring and artistic finish of a cameo, and with only that sort of moonlight haze shed about it that she loves so much better than the garish brilliancy of gas, or candles. To this retreat saunters also the figure, on whose tall magnificent proportions even the eyes of the feminine æsthetes have rested with an admiration contrary to all the tenets of their school. He seats himself beside Lady Etwynde. "What a charming retreat," he says softly. "Do you know I wish you would give me a little information about this 'æstheticism,' of which you seem a high priestess? I confess I feel quite bewildered." She smiles. She does not look up. "Yes, I suppose it is new to you," she answers. "The worst of it is that, like all new doctrines, it is being ruined by exaggeration. Genuine æstheticism is, as of course you know, the science of beauty, and its true perception and pursuit. Our school has its canons, its doctrines, its schemes and projects, on which oceans of ridicule have been poured and yet left it unharmed. It has done much good; it has taught the poetry of colour and arrangement to a class whose dress and abodes were simply appalling to people of taste. If you have ever suffered from the gilded abominations of a millionaire's drawing-room----" Colonel Carlisle moves a little impatiently. "But is this craze to regulate our lives, to be the great 'all' of our existence? Are men and women to go about long-haired, straight-gowned, tousled; jabbering 'intense' nonsense and gushing over blue china and sunflowers; and is such an existence considered elevating, manly, or useful? To me it seems as if I were looking on at a pantomime." "You are not educated yet," says Lady Etwynde, with a demure smile. "Everything new has, of course, its opponents. You have read Plato?" "When I was at school," answers the Colonel. "Ah!" sighs Lady Etwynde. "And you have forgotten all he says about artistic excellence and beauty; the relations of all physical and moral and intellectual life to what is most perfect and intelligent; how life should be filled with grace and dignity, the mind cultured to its utmost capability, the body beautified by vital activity and ennobled by a healthy and carefully taught appreciation of all that is conducive to physical and mental perfection." "Has it taken you thirteen years to learn all this?" asks Colonel Carlisle softly, as he leans forward and looks into her eyes in the silver haze of the lamplight. She starts a little. "You think I am so--changed?" she says, in her natural voice, and discarding æsthetic languor.